A six year-old was one of those shot dead in a cinema by a man with a Batman
fixation - how disturbing

James Holmes. It’s a quiet sort of name for a mass murderer. When the 24-year-old appeared in a Colorado courtroom, stripped of his guns, body armour, mask and his evil Joker persona, he looked pitiful. The idea that this inadequate individual had snuffed out 12 lives at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of the Batman trilogy, was incredible. But then unreality – the failure to distinguish between what’s true and what’s make-believe – is the crux of this tragedy.

When Holmes first opened fire, using some of the 6,000 rounds of ammunition he had bought online, cinema patrons said they didn’t notice. They thought it was part of the film. And there was something else that was hard to grasp. Tragically, among the dead was a six-year-old, Veronica Moser-Sullivan.

What was a six-year-old doing at a midnight screening of such a violent film? A film with a 12A rating in the UK, which means a child under 12 cannot see it on their own. In the States it’s a PG13, which permits kids under 12, though parents are “advised” that it “might not be suitable”.

What kind of adult would subject a tired little girl, with a highly plastic imagination, to the deafening horrors of Christopher Nolan’s movie? Incredibly, Veronica Moser-Sullivan wasn’t the only, or even the youngest, child present at the cinema in Aurora that night. One couple took along a baby and a four-year-old.

Veronica’s pregnant mother, Ashley, did her very best to shield her daughter when Holmes started shooting, sustaining horrible injuries herself. “Her motherly instincts took over and she tried to save her life,” said Ian Sullivan, Veronica’s father. “She was the sweetest, most innocent, angelic little child.”

Well, I went to see The Dark Knight Rises last night and, I tell you, the innocent or angelic should be kept well away. In my house, we have our own film classification system. There’s SFG – Safe For Grandparents. And then there’s MA – Mummy Appropriate. The Dark Knight Rises would not get an MA rating. I belong to that endangered species of cinema-goer who still finds violence deeply upsetting, rather than funny in a knowing Tarantino kind of way.

At least, unlike the previous Dark Knight film, this one didn’t have a pencil being driven into someone’s eyeball by a demonic Joker. Batman (Christian Bale) has decided he is opposed to the use of guns, but there is enough punching, garroting and casual slaughter to satisfy the most Call of Duty-addled teenager.

Torrence Brown Jr, who was in the cinema when his friend was killed, is said to be suing Warner Bros for “making the movie too violent”. Good luck with that. You might as as well subpoena God for summer rainfall. Violence is the prevailing cultural weather of Hollywood. Anyone who points this out is damned as being in favour of censorship (boo!). Only please don’t tell me that certain warped minds, minds like that of James Holmes, don’t sup full of the horrors they see on screen and develop a taste for it. Can it be coincidence that Holmes boobytrapped his apartment with explosives to kill police – the same wicked trick played in Speed by the maniacal Dennis Hopper?

There is very little we can do about the motiveless mayhem unleashed by lone lunatics like Holmes, though such an appalling massacre demands a response. In America, they have decided that the way to discourage mass killers is to deny them a place in history. Visiting Aurora, Barack Obama pledged not to refer to the killer by name. Some might argue it would be more effective to deny him the right to buy 6,000 bullets at a time. In the UK, we struggle to purchase two packets of Piriton in Boots. Remember that jaw-dropping scene in Bowling for Columbine in which Michael Moore goes to a bank that is offering a free gun to anyone opening an account? Such a culture is not looking for a cure; it doesn’t even know it’s sick. We need to ask what kind of a system allows a six-year-old to watch such a frightening film. What use is Parental Guidance when so many parents seem unable to exercise judgment to protect their young?

Batman himself flew into Colorado yesterday to pay his condolences. “It’s amazing to see Christian Bale,” said one fan, “he was stepping into reality.” So the actor who plays a fictional hero visits the scene of a real crime committed by a real student who thought he was a fictional villain and enemy of Batman, but who murdered real people who had gone to see a movie about a fictional hero who has the powers to defeat evil. Confused? We all are. And that confusion is a breeding ground in which dangerous minds can bloom and grow.

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I’ll flash my cash where I like

Do take extra care on Saturday night, folks. You have just got back from a relaxed evening and have gone to get £30 (subject to regional variations) for Emily the babysitter. As you hand over the cash to this grateful sixth-former, a man jumps out from a bush by the front door.

Is it the local flasher and sex pest? No, much worse. It is David Gauke, the Treasury minister. In a voice like Charlton Heston’s Moses, Mr Gauke points to the babysitter’s money and booms: “Have you got a receipt for that?”

“No,” you admit, “I always pay the babysitter in cash. She doesn’t take cheques.”

“Paying in cash is morally wrong,” thunders Moses Gauke. “Do you realise that you are facilitating the hidden economy and that’s as big a loss to the Exchequer as tax avoidance?”

“But you’ve taken away my child benefit,” you shout, “so we can’t afford to go out that often, and now you’ve got the cheek to turn up here hoping to put VAT on babysitting. I thought the Tory Government was meant to be on the side of hard-working families?”

Exit David Gauke, pelted with used Pampers.

The reason why Mr Gauke’s remarks have caused such a commotion is because, quite frankly, we are sick of it. Sick of coughing up every last penny in tax. Sick of seeing Bentley-driving comedian Jimmy Carr get away with paying 1 per cent in tax when we hand over thousands in both tax and National Insurance for our nanny, as though we were a multinational corporation, not a dual-income family. Sick of bankers’ bonuses. Sick of being called cheats for buying a house near a good school because we know damn well that Nick Clegg and his priggish kind will be playing elitist or religious cards for their own kids. Sick of being lectured for using just a few of the little tricks which the rich pay top accountants to conjure up for them.

So, David Gauke, here’s how it is. I will continue to pay the delightful Marek in cash when he comes round to assemble the unfathomable IKEA wardrobe. I will pay my babysitters generously in cash because they are young at a time when it is bitterly hard to be young. I will pay my cleaner in cash, and I happen to know she pays tax, though, quite frankly, I don’t care if she declares only half her earnings and finds a Jimmy Carr weasel clause because she works a damn sight harder than he does. In fact, I will pay anyone I choose in cash because at least I know the money is going to deserving people, which is more than can be said by a sclerotic Whitehall bureaucracy.

If you have a problem with any of the above, Mr Gauke, please do feel free to pop round and we can have a lively debate about how the hounded, law-abiding middle classes feel increasingly murderous. Go ahead, make my day!

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Beware a planner in the works

Best of luck to J K Rowling. The Harry Potter author is hoping to build a treehouse for her son and daughter in her Edinburgh garden. The Hogwarts-style structure is said to cost about £150,000.

When we moved into our house, I too made the mistake of thinking it would be fun to build a tree-house for my small children. It wasn’t quite on the Hogwarts scale. Picture a sort of Wendy House on a stick.

The structure was put up in the back garden. The kids loved it. But a week later, I got a letter from the town planning department. “Did I have planning permission for my structure?”

“It’s a children’s tree-house,” I replied. “Why do we need planning permission?”

The planning department sent a letter to every house in our road asking if anyone objected to the tree-house, which none of them could see. No one objected. The spoilsports were undeterred. Two officials came round to inspect the tree-house. One asked: “Is it a car-port?”

“How can it be a car-port?” I said, starting to feel just a teeny bit annoyed. “It’s in a garden and there’s no road.”

The planning gents seemed unconvinced. A few days later, I got a letter explaining that, although the tree-house itself was small, and did not require planning permission, the cubic area of empty air under the tree-house exceeded the permitted building area. So we would have to apply retrospectively for permission.

I will not bore you with the sum it cost to get architectural drawings done. Nor will I point out that, when we finally got planning permission, the kids decided the tree-house was “boring” and it was frequented only by spiders.

I will say this to J K Rowling. Planning departments do not understand the concept of fun. Or children. Or tree-houses. I suggest using a very powerful spell. The Furnunculus Curse, perhaps the one that causes miserable blighters to be covered in boils.